


Five Times Jazz Tried To Get Prowl To Let Him Bite Him, And One Time Prowl Actually Shot Him For It

by dragonofdispair, Rizobact



Series: Vampiric Codex [6]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Vampires, Blood Drinking, Canon-Typical Violence, Continuity What Continuity, Dark Fantasy, Gen, Harassment, Horror, Vampire!Jazz, Vampires, dark fantasy edging into horror, is that a thing?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 17:38:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15954257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact
Summary: Vampires stalk Cybertron’s nights. Being an Autobot doesn’t make Jazz any less a treacherous, predatorymonster.Prowl can work with that… until he can’t.





	Five Times Jazz Tried To Get Prowl To Let Him Bite Him, And One Time Prowl Actually Shot Him For It

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prowlxjazz community's [eleventh year anniversary challenge](https://prowlxjazz.dreamwidth.org/1731772.html) on dreamwidth.
> 
> Jazz has no right being so adorable, but he’s _only_ cute because he isn’t human/Cybertronian anymore. If he weren't a vampire (which in this AU sort of makes him closer to a feral cat than a person) his behavior wouldn't be cute at all. It’d be all sorts of creepy and offensive, and Prowl **IS** totally justified in shooting him when he doesn’t back off.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Dark fantasy, vampires, blood drinking, harassment, canon-typical violence.

 

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#  One

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Prowl tensed as Jazz slunk into his office to deliver his report. They were trying to map under the plate. Most Autobots, those who never went under there, thought of the eternal darkness beneath their feet as homogenous, but Prowl knew better. There were huge swaths of Decepticon territory, true, but there were also still armed enclaves of gangs, as well as the increasingly rare territories hunted and defended viciously by the dwindling number of feral native vampires. If any true progress was to be made in the war against the monsters, they needed to keep track of their actual targets. 

Personally, Prowl would like to eliminate all vampires from Iacon entirely, but he had to keep his goals achievable, and that meant focusing on the Decepticons for now.

Which was why they needed a map. Several maps. There were also ferals — or what they  _ called _ ferals, even though they were gladiator pit escapees, fledges, or the remnants of the pogrom on free vampires that had followed who had fallen back on instinct, not true created-under-the-plate ferals — taking advantage of the more organized Decepticon attacks to roam the surface, hunting the careless and lairing in ruined buildings. They were establishing their own hunting territories, with their own map-able borders. And no one knew where Dai Atlas and his followers, the so-called (Prowl sneered) Circle of Light, was. Even if he couldn’t go after any of them right now, he needed to know where they were to avoid them. He lost enough mechs, civilians and hunters alike, to unplanned encounters as it was.

Jazz was not what Prowl would have called a  _ reliable _ agent, but he was the only one he had that  _ wasn’t prey, _ and as such he — and the information he brought from under the plates — was invaluable. Desperation had forced Prowl to take him on, and he was both relieved to be getting results and resentful of the methods he’d been reduced to in order to get them. Jazz was annoying on top of being a disgusting, untrustworthy bloodsucker with his own monstrous desires and selfish agenda… 

The vampire in question knew better than to come within striking distance of Prowl; the former police officer kept a holy oil soaked baton with Primus’ name etched on it on his person at all times, so he wisely stayed back and leaned against the wall. Uncomfortably close, but out of immediate danger for either of them. "I get the feeling y'don't like me much?"

Prowl snorted. "Oh really. I suppose I should be clearer: I hate your treacherous undead guts. But you are an asset." Much to Prowl’s disgust and dismay.

Even more disgusting was that almost  _ pleased  _ sounding purr he made whenever Prowl was forced to acknowledge his usefulness. The monster barely had a discernible EM field, but among the faint alien whispers that were there, an irritatingly familiar sense of  _ want _ seeped out into the air. 

It felt like standing in the center of a spotlight, if a spotlight were capable of projecting a desire to bite him.

Not a chance in the  _ Pit. _ “Report to Wheeljack,” Prowl snapped, just to get the creature out of his office. At least the science team would keep the Autobots’ only cooperative vampire busy until sunrise. Given how long the Decepticons had been confined to the gladiator pits, they knew surprisingly little about vampires.

Jazz left his report on the corner of a filing cabinet on his way out the door, petulant pout firmly in place to let Prowl know just how he felt about being chased off… for the couple of nanokliks it took for him to go right back to that subtly intense  _ want _ **_want_ ** _ bite?? _ as he peered back in around the doorframe. 

“Wheeljack.  _ Now,” _ Prowl barked, glaring. He didn’t dare turn back to his work, or retrieve that report so he could start incorporating it into the Autobot vampire hunters’ strategies, until Jazz was  _ gone. _ He was a  _ threat. _ “Or I’m calling Ratchet to  _ take _ you there.” 

Slagging monster had the audacity to  _ grin  _ at the order, flashing his fangs at him before repeating, “Wheeljack. On m’way,” and disappearing from sight.

When that damned desire faded down the hall, Prowl knew he had actually gone. Only then did his doors relax minutely.

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#  Two

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For once, just once, it would have been nice to get a report from Jazz without him practically drooling over him. Prowl already  _ knew  _ he wanted to bite him. Of  _ course  _ he wanted to bite him. So was it really necessary to keep licking his lips like that?

_ Tiny bite?  _ he seemed to be asking, helm tilted slightly to the side as he contemplated Prowl’s wrist.  _ Just a tiny bite? _

“No,” Prowl said firmly, resisting the impulse to hide his hands under his desk. Ratchet said he had to be firm, never back down, and never show fear, and Ratchet was the closest thing they had to an expert on vampire psychology and behavior. The science team concurred that the two Autobot vampires had a more limited emotional range than true mechs did, and that it was better to handle them almost like intelligent mechanimals in some ways. But even Ratchet admitted to being baffled as to why Jazz was so fixated with Prowl.

“Didn’t say anything,” Jazz said, helm tilting further as his shoulders came slightly forward away from the wall.  _ Really tiny bite? _

_ “No.” _ Prowl stood, flaring his doors intimidatingly. “Why are you even still in here?” Sunrise was in less than a joor and there was a (very deliberately constructed) strip of morning sun between Autobot HQ and the asylum Ratchet had claimed to house the vampires in. Not to mention the giant window in Prowl’s office itself. “If you fall into torpor in here, I will  _ laugh _ while you burn.”

“Mean,” Jazz sulked. All the very put-upon sulk, without so much as a step toward the door.

Prowl just glared, utterly indifferent to the monster’s attempt to manipulate him.

_ Want.  _ Jazz’s sulk evaporated, replaced by that pleased purr/growl.  **_Want._ **

An angry pursuit engine revved loudly. If Jazz took so much as a  _ single _ step toward him, Prowl would… “I do not want you here,” he said clearly, trying very hard not to think about his own berth in his own (locked, warded, threshold protected) quarters as he enunciated each syllable. He was tired and headachy and he still had several joors of work, coordinating the daylight hunting parties that would be venturing beneath the plates today, before he could so much as think about resting. The vampire’s continued presence was  _ entirely  _ unwanted.

And the sulk was back as quick as it had gone, hunching Jazz’s shoulders as he finally turned toward the door, dragging his feet like Prowl had kicked him. One foot slid further into the room—

Prowl’s optics narrowed at the deceitful attempt to creep closer. “Get. Out,” he snarled.

Jazz’s foot pulled back with gratifying speed, and he didn’t try it again. He slinked out with that same infuriating smile quirking his lips, almost like he was pleased to have lost the power struggle. The door closed behind him and Prowl glared at it for a klik, wishing for a moment that he could just get rid of Jazz.

He didn’t realize how much time he’d lost to that fantasy until the first glimmer of sunlight glinted on the horizon, signalling the time when all but a few, rare vampires would go into torpor. He shook himself, refocusing his thoughts. Jazz would keep for another cycle, and there was more work to do. Unless Jazz’s report contained something that would disrupt his plans, the Wreckers were going down to burn out one of Shockwave’s lairs… 

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#  Three

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Some cycles Prowl had more patience for Jazz’s bizarre vampiric fixation with him than others. As in, some cycles he could grit his teeth and put up with it as long as he had to in order to get what he needed from the single-minded monster, and other cycles he just wanted to kill him and damn the consequences.

With Jazz behaving as obnoxiously as ever, despite Ratchet actually being in the room with them this time, he was rapidly approaching a breaking point.

“So? Did I do good?” Jazz asked, angling for  _ just a little bite? _

Prowl wanted to shout a sparkfelt  _ NO, Go Away, Get Away From Me! _ but from a purely factual perspective, Jazz had done extremely well. “It’s acceptable,” he managed.

Jazz’s pleased purr grated along his nerve-circuits. “That mean ya like me any better now?”

“No. Stop asking. I hate you.”

The resulting attempt at sulking wasn’t even a good one. Jazz barely ducked his head, and wasn’t even trying to hide his grin despite his dispirited huff. 

“Go sulk somewhere else,” Prowl snapped while Ratchet watched them interact. He did  _ not _ want to deal with this today.

So, of course, today was when Jazz decided to push his luck. “Yeah?” he drawled, casually leaning forward into Prowl’s space. “Or what?”

Half panicked by the crowding, half simply  _ fed up with it all, _ Prowl pulled a gun from subspace. If the monster came any closer he’d—

“Pfft.” Jazz backed off, dancing away like he’d never intended to get close in the first place. “Relax. Not gonna,”  _ want to,  _ **_want to,_ ** “bite ya,” he said. Then, Primus be praised, he skittered out the door without lingering for once.

Letting out a stressed sigh, Prowl shuddered and lowered the gun. He set it aside and rubbed at the headache forming behind his optics. 

Ratchet, meanwhile, was rolling his. “Still obsessed with you, I see.” 

“Yes,” Prowl answered simply.

“I suppose it could be worse.”

Doorwings twitched as his tactical suite automatically attempted to calculate a worse case than Jazz’s constant harassment. Most of them involved the monster deciding the protection and fuel supplied to him by the Autobots was irrelevant and outright attacking Prowl to sate his desire for the tactician’s fuel. That did not make his headache any better. “How so?”

“He could lose interest in submitting to you, at which point you’d lose most, if not all, of the sway you hold with him since you don’t feed him. I doubt he’d go so far as to attack you,” Ratchet said, “but he could decide there’s nothing in it for him to listen to you anymore.”

Urk. That was worse. “If he doesn’t make himself useful, the Autobots have no reason to provide for him,” Prowl countered weakly; some of the fledges under Ratchet’s care didn’t actually fight for them, just hung around the asylum being treated like pampered pets.

“And if he doesn’t attack anyone, we have no reason  _ not  _ to,” Ratchet returned. “He’s not stupid, you know. I have no idea what’s going on in his head, but if this quirk ever fades, you’re going to have to either let him bite you or give him to a different commander if you want to keep getting results.” 

Hypocrite.  _ “You _ don’t let them bite you.” Nor, Prowl thought, should he, but, “They continue to listen to you.”

“Yes — because I’m good for more than food. And Jazz will listen to you as long as you’re good for more than food too. But since I’m not sure what exactly he’s getting out of this, I can’t promise he won’t decide he can live without it, or get whatever it is elsewhere. There are plenty of other Autobots who’d offer to shoot him, after all.”

Lovely. As though Prowl needed more reasons to want the bloodsucker dead.

“Of course, you could always just give him to another commander anyway if he’s just going to give you headaches,” Ratchet added unhelpfully.

Prowl didn’t dignify that with a response.

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#  Four

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He didn’t even have a report this time. Jazz had just stopped by to confirm mission details he  _ already knew,  _ and now he was hovering over in “his” corner of the room, not-staring at Prowl behind his desk.  _ Justalittlebitetho?? _

“NO!” Prowl  _ already _ had a headache. That was the only reason he’d resorted to yelling so quickly. He hoped.

At least the vampire didn’t get offended over being yelled at. He just slid down the wall and curled up into a defensive  _ sulk. _ If it weren’t so blatantly an attempt to manipulate him, Prowl might have been tempted to apologize; as it was Prowl may have threatened him occasionally, but he’d never actually  _ done _ anything to warrant such a defensive reaction from Jazz. 

Sure enough, after a little over a klik of just sitting there staring at the floor, Jazz’s helm came up enough to peek over his arms at Prowl. The blue visor hid his unnaturally red optics, but Prowl could still feel them boring into his plating as the tone of his sulk, if it could be called that, shifted from sullen to hopeful.

Prowl glared. He wasn’t letting the vampire anywhere  _ near _ his plating!

As if the glare was an invitation, Jazz’s head came up a little more. His gaze shifted from Prowl’s wrist to his face, engaging in a staring contest.

Prowl’s optics narrowed. That was a new level of immaturity, which the tactician did not have time to cater to. “Get out of my office.”

Jazz didn’t flinch or turn away. “Why?”

Damned monster was getting pushier. “Because,” Prowl tried to explain calmly, the nerve circuits behind his optics and forehead pounding painfully, “you're distracting me from work, and I hate your undead Unicron-spawned guts.” Even if vampires weren’t technically “undead”. The difference was semantic as far as Prowl was concerned, and  _ Unicron-spawned _ definitely applied!

“Leavin’ your office won't change that,” Jazz said, unbroken stare turning challenging. “You'll still hate me even if I’m not here.”

“You'll be less of a distraction,” Prowl retorted sharply.

Monster must not have had a good answer to that, because his head dropped back into his arms and he continued to  _ stare/sulk  _ over them in silence. Then, just before Prowl could tell him again to get lost, his visor brightened and he uncurled a bit. “Little bite first, then I’ll go away?”

That was it. That was  _ absolutely it. _ He  _ could not _ deal with this right now. “OUT!” Prowl pulled out his gun and actually cocked it to fire.

Jazz’s plating flattened down as he skittered back, sulking his way over to the door.

The victory was somewhat marred by the fact that he was making that Primus-damned happy purr the whole way out.

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#  Five

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Decepticons, ferals… as if Prowl didn’t have  _ enough _ to keep track of without rogue Circle vampires roaming around being a nuisance. At least he was assuming right now that it was a Circle vampire, because it was not behaving like a Decepticon or any flavor of feral or fledge they knew of. On the upside, if they managed to capture it, they might finally get a lead as to where Dai Atlas had disappeared to. But it hadn’t killed anyone (that they knew of), so Optimus wouldn’t let him devote too many resources to pinning down the new development. Assigning one agent though, for a short time, wasn’t unreasonable, and it’d be worth jumping through hoops to justify it to the Prime to know where that particular nest of Unicron-spawn had been hiding all this time.

Prowl finished explaining all this to Jazz, delivering the mission briefing in clipped, succinct tones. “Any questions?”

“Just one,” Jazz smiled. Prowl already knew he wasn’t going to like it. “If I catch him for you, do I get to bite?”

“No. Questions about the  _ mission, _ Jazz.”

“Was a question about the mission,” Jazz said, a calculating look Prowl liked even less than his usual smile flickering in his visor. “I’m askin’ why I should do it.”

Prowl’s fuel lines went cold. Ratchet’s long-ago prediction coming to fruition. He narrowed his optics, but forced himself to turn away and start rifling through his other agent files. He had no other vampires, of course, but, “If that has become a condition to you making yourself useful to me,” he said coldly, “then I see no reason not to replace you. Dismissed.”

And don’t come back. Prowl would ensure it, warding  _ every nanometer _ of his office to keep the annoying menace out.

“So… I either do this mission, or I don’t get any more missions.” Prowl couldn’t see the monster (and it was taking everything he had not to let his doors twitch at that vulnerability) but he could hear him sulking over that. “And if I do it, you won’t replace me?”

“If you have a  _ legitimate _ ,” Prowl’s definition of legitimate, “reason to refuse this or any mission, I will consider it, just like I always have.” Prime and Ratchet would both have strung him up by his rear tires if he’d tried giving Jazz a suicide mission just to get rid of him. Prowl forced himself to continue flicking through the agent files, considering them. It sounded like calling Jazz’s bluff was working, but you couldn’t lie to a vampire; he needed to be ready to go through with this. “I put up with you diverting to look for your twin,” mostly because, until Ricochet had been found, there had been no way to  _ stop  _ Jazz from looking, “but you do not get to leverage biting me as a condition of doing your assigned work. If that has become a condition, then you are no longer useful to me.”

Mirage might be able to do this. His skill at hiding wasn’t as foolproof against being caught and eaten by a rogue vampire as Jazz being inedible, but he was an accomplished agent. As a bonus, he could search the areas where the rogue was operating during daylight, looking for possible lairing spots.

“Meanin’ I  _ am  _ useful if I’m not leveraging bites.” For once that happy purr/growl was a good sound; it meant Jazz  _ wanted  _ to be useful. “Even though ya still don’t like me.”

“I have  _ never _ liked you.” Jazz still hadn’t agreed to the mission, so Prowl pulled out Mirage’s file to read through it. “You are useful because you complete your missions with a reasonably high rate of success, but coercing me into allowing you to bite me is  _ not allowed, _ and you are not  _ so _ useful I cannot afford to replace you if you attempt it.”

_ Sulk/purr.  _ “No coercing. Got it.” Prowl heard Jazz shuffle back a step, submitting. “How many nights can I stay out?”

Prowl looked up from the file. “Does that mean you are agreeing to the mission?”

“Yes.” Jazz’s posture had dropped all hints of his earlier confrontational attitude, though his desire to bite hadn’t waned in the slightest. If anything, it was  _ stronger,  _ whispering through the space between them in his abnormal EM field — but he wasn’t  _ saying  _ anything about it. “How many nights?”

Mirage’s file snapped closed and Prowl pulled over the reports on the rogue vampire again. There was a lot of ground to cover, potentially both above and below the remaining plates as well as along Iacon’s outskirts, and it’d be moving at the same time Jazz was… “Two nights at a time,” Prowl decided, citing the maximum amount of time Ratchet allowed Jazz to go between feedings. “You’ll deliver a report on your progress each time you return here, and right now you have one decacycle to find it in.”

“Kay.” Jazz straightened, slinking over to the door with his usual smooth steps. His claws curled around the doorknob, and he hesitated. “And if I catch him for you…?” 

“I’ll buy you a houseplant,” Prowl retorted, refusing to promise anything he knew the vampire would just use to push further, like additional feeding or even affection. Luckily, it was enough; with one last fanged smile, Jazz disappeared to begin the hunt.

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#  \+ One

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Prowl remembered the bombing run. Rushing down to the building’s bunker, trying to get under a safer threshold before this one broke. The Decepticons hadn’t managed to break the threshold on Autobot HQ yet, but three of the anti-air guns had been taken out before the seekers started their runs. It was a situation ripe for disaster, and Prowl had been one of those caught in it.

He remembered light, and pressure, and pain. He remembered being tossed like a rag puppet by the explosion’s shockwave. He — very dimly — remembered being buried.

As far as his (functioning) sensors could tell him, he was still buried. Several objects of varying sizes were pressing down on him, some of them painfully, and there was no light other than the narrow beam from his own optics. There was a slab of plascrete sitting two nanometers from his face, and he couldn’t turn his head to see what was on either side of him.

Most of the Autobot fledges had been buried after they were turned… The thought made Prowl panic. No. Anything but that.

Struggling against the rubble only brought more pain, highlighting each of his injuries on his HUD as he exacerbated them. One doorwing was twisted back beneath him unnaturally, his left foot was (probably, he wasn’t getting clear signals from it) partially crushed, and his fuel levels were slowly dropping from a number of small leaks littered across his frame. His chest felt tight, and his spark spun rapidly beneath—

Intact. His chassis was intact. He was heavily dented and his warped plating was compressing his internal components, but his chest armor hadn’t been breached. His spark was safe.

Okay. He tried to draw a calming breath through his cooling systems and engine, only to groan when he found the system partially blocked by the dust and debris from the collapsed building. Ouch. Calming himself without breath was harder, but he managed, a little. Standard operating procedures: after the battle was done, there would be search and rescue efforts. And his comsuite had gone silent mid-battle, so they  _ would _ be looking for him.

His chronometer ticked away the nanokliks almost hypnotically, but it was better than watching his diagnostics as he bled out.

Was that…? Prowl focused his audio pickup. Yes; there was something above him, digging down through the rubble. It was still far enough away to be only a faint scrabbling, but it was slowly getting louder, closer… 

The weight on top of him shifted, pressing down before lightening. Then he heard a very  _ definite _ sound of scratching or digging. He tried to call out to his rescuer, but his vocalizer was choked with dust just like his airways.

He was glad of that a few kliks later when the sound got close enough that he should have been able to feel a rescuer’s EM field… and he couldn’t. The debris shifted again, enough that Prowl was able to move one of his shoulders. He’d lost his primary weapon in the chaos, but he had a hold out, if he could just— there. He wasn’t going to be some Decepticon’s prey!

Of course the monster was zeroing in on him even without him making any sound. The energon leaking from his lines was a beacon to it. It was going to be in for a nasty surprise when it tried to make a meal of him!

Prowl could feel the air around him shift as the vampire finally reached the pocket he’d been pinned in. His finger tightened on the trigger of his gun, just waiting for a clear shot—

“Prowl? You conscious down there?”

Jazz. Relief and dread chased themselves in a tight circle in Prowl’s spark. It was unlikely (though possible, the worst case scenario his tactical suite could throw at him) Jazz would kill him. All of the Autobot vampires helped with search and rescue, their senses making them proficient at finding living mechs, but there had been incidents, and if any allied vampire would take the chance, risk the consequences, to get a taste of Prowl, it was Jazz.

“I—” he coughed, dust still clogging his speech systems. “Here,” he croaked.

“Thought ya felt awake.” Jazz’s digging shifted, moving so that he was clearing the rubble above Prowl’s head instead of his torso. “Bleedin’ just a bit, aren’t you?”

There was no use denying it, however much he’d like to hide his injuries. The creature would be able to smell it, and in a few kliks would be able to see for himself. “Y-”  _ cough _ “Yes.”

“Kay. Try not to bleed out till I can get to you.”

_ So I can eat you,  _ Prowl tried not to imagine him adding. Unfortunately, as the barrier between them slowly came apart under the vampire’s determined claws, Prowl began being able to sense the oppressive, threatening want _ want _ **_want!_ ** of his bloodlust. His field of vision was still blocked when he felt the first brush of those claws on his plating — at first just bumping against him incidentally as he pulled away another piece of debris, but then trailing slowly, almost tenderly, up his arm.

_ Through the energon running down his arm. _

Prowl’s frame seized painfully as his fuel pump spiked in fear. Jazz had never been this close to him before, had never  _ touched _ him. He couldn’t force him to stop, didn’t dare tell him to go away. He tried anyway. “Don’t,” he coughed.

Jazz’s hand pulled away, but he didn’t say anything. He just perched up there silently in the rubble, doing… what? What was he doing? What was he thinking? Prowl needed to  _ see! _

“You’re sso scared,” Jazz said softly, the words lisping more than his usual accented drawl. Prowl had heard it often enough (though never before from Jazz), that he could clearly imagine the distended, hungry fangs. He could practically see the vampire licking his lips, his claws with  _ his  _ energon on them. “I can taste it.”

There was no use denying it. You couldn’t lie to a vampire. “I-” He coughed again, grit grinding into the mechanisms of his vocalizer. “I don’t want you biting me.”

“I know. No coercing.” His voice was closer, like he’d brought his face almost to the opening in the rubble. “But…” The claws were back on his arm. “Licking isn’t biting?”

_ No! Get the frag off of me! _ The words caught in his vocalizer, were lost to another coughing fit. There was no way the message wasn’t crystal clear in his field, but Jazz never obeyed non-verbal commands. He only ever took them as a challenge, an invitation to push the boundaries of their relationship until Prowl reaffirmed them.

Claws flexed minutely as Jazz hesitated. Then, with a sound somewhere between a whine and a growl, Prowl felt something  _ else  _ touch his arm.

Hot and wet… Prowl gasped in horror, as Jazz made that satisfied, pleased purr he had always hated.  _ No. Nonononono… _ Jazz’s tongue returned, laving at the energon dripping from the wound until he reached the tear itself, and Prowl felt the sharp brush of his fangs—

Prowl’s vision whited in panic. He wrenched his crushed foot nearly entirely off twisting to bring the hold out pistol to bear. He shot the off-balance vampire before his mind could catch up with his frame.

The shot succeeded in getting Jazz off him, but by the pained growl/hiss coming from nearby it was clear he hadn’t gone far. Prowl had no idea how much damage he’d managed to do, no idea whether he’d only enraged the monster enough to tear into him and finish him off. 

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the growl faded. “You shot me,” Jazz said clearly from several feet away. There was no trace of a lisp left in his speech. “You really shot me.”

Prowl didn’t count on his voice. He’d definitely damaged himself further twisting like that, but instead of collapsing back into the hole to wait for medical to find him, he pushed himself further, struggling to get the final pieces of debris away from his face. He tried his comsuite again, now that he wasn’t buried, and found it inoperable.

Jazz hadn’t moved, but Prowl didn’t trust it. He’d never precisely trusted  _ him _ at all, but whatever faith he might have had in Jazz previously had been obliterated. He leveled the gun on him again as his frame was wracked with hacking, trying to clear the dirt from his cooling systems and bring air into his stressed engine.

“I… I’m gonna go get someone,” Jazz said, backing away with contritely clamped-down plating. He had energon running down his arm now, sluggishly bleeding from a ragged hole in his shoulder. “Should’ve just got someone. No biting,” he held up his hands, a pantomime of helplessness that was a filthy lie. “Won’t bite you. Won’t touch you.”

Prowl didn’t believe him. He kept the pistol as steady as he could. The wracking coughs quieted, dented fans finally drawing breath into irritated airways. He reset his vocalizer. “Go,” he tried, and was dismayed it came out as a weak croak rather than a command. “Go away.”

“Going away,” Jazz said all the same, obeying immediately. “I’ll send someone t’help you.”

The tactician didn’t lower his weapon until Jazz was out of sight. He tried keeping it up longer, but his injured frame wouldn’t hold it; his arm shook as he slowly lowered the gun. Jazz didn’t suddenly pop back up, pouncing from behind the wreckage, so that was something.

Prowl still didn’t believe Jazz wasn’t just waiting for him to collapse again, until someone else really did show up to help him.

“Well. He wasn’t exaggerating. You really are a mess,” Ratchet said, carefully picking his way over to Prowl so he could crouch down at his side. “Can you talk?”

“A little,” Prowl managed around the painful grit. His limbs were shaking again, and he tried to clutch the gun with suddenly slack fingers, but it clattered to the ground despite his efforts. Ratchet reached out to catch it before it slipped away into the rubble, but didn’t hand it back.

“I’d appreciate if you didn’t shoot me too,” the medic said with a dry huff. “I’ve got enough work to do without having to fix holes in my own plating.”

Prowl shook his head slowly. “Won’t.” He and Ratchet had their issues, most commonly over how they viewed the allied vampires, but he did trust him. A lot more than his monstrous  _ pets. _

“I’d ask why you felt you had to put a hole in Jazz,” Ratchet leaned in, shining a small handheld penlight at several points on Prowl’s frame, “but you shouldn’t keep trying to talk past all the junk you’ve got rattling around in there. Plus,” he added, pulling out several temp patches and slapping one over the wound Jazz had licked clean, “he told me it was a ‘fair shooting’.”

Obeying Ratchet’s command not to talk, Prowl’s field still roiled in the fear and disgust he’d felt at the brush of fangs against his plating.

Ratchet arched a brow ridge curiously. “That’s not the anger I was expecting,” he said, patching another leak. “Do I need to do something about him?”

How did the medic expect him to answer that without speaking? Prowl nodded, though he realized he didn’t know how Ratchet encouraged or discouraged behaviors in his little “pack”. He didn’t know what the consequences of this would be for Jazz.

He knew that as  _ soon _ as he was able, he was going to wallpaper his (rebuilt) office with wards, and if the creature ever tried creeping anywhere near it, he’d  _ shoot him again. _ Prowl’s free hand came up to check the necklace at his throat, the cartouche etched with Primus’ name, that would have kept Jazz from the energon lines there — a vampire’s favorite — that obviously wasn’t enough.

Ratchet sighed and patted his shoulder gently. “Let’s get you out of here and into a secure ward,” he said. “Somewhere you’ll feel safe while I get you put back together.”

_ That _ Prowl could agree with.

.

.

.

End

**Author's Note:**

> Here is a link to the [Vampiric Codex Official Timeline](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uS2EX-d3Npd00EkN2SxOa7010AUFPI0TVqiS2vbnsbQ/edit?usp=sharing).


End file.
